Google Season of Docs/Project Ideas

If you want to work on computer-aided design (CAD), geometry, or graphics documentation, you've come to the right place! Please check out our project ideas below. They are roughly in order or priority and difficulty. Here are some links to help you get started with a proposal:

We will consider GSoD proposals for all skill levels ranging from simple to crazy hard and everything in between. Introduce yourself via chat (preferred) or via e-mail, and we'll help you plan a project right for you.

Remember that project descriptions are just rough ideas. You must expand with considerably more detail. Set goals that fit your experience and interest.

This is as straight-forward as it sounds, write an introduction intended for users discovering BRL-CAD for the first time. It should minimally cover basic installation, an overall description of capabilities, of BRL-CAD's modeling principles, basic usage of major tools, modeling, import/export, analysis, and rendering. It should be as concise as possible, structured either as a single independent document or series of independent articles.

Tame the beast. BRL-CAD has more than a million words of documentation spread across hundreds of documents. Some are huge, some are small. There are books, articles, presentations, manual pages, diagrams, reference cards, and more in a variety of formats and locations. The goal of this task to to conduct a complete audit of all existing documentation, categorize and organize documentation, make recommendations and/or facilitate with merging overlapping documentation, and present all available documentation in a new web index.

BRL-CAD has approximately 2 dozen primitives. New users learning how to model with BRL-CAD for the first time end up utilizing an appendix in our existing MGED Tutorial Series, which is a brief guide to some of the supported primitives. For this project, we'd like all primitives to be documented with rendered visuals where appropriate, explanation of all parameters, and depiction of the variety possible with each primitive.

BRL-CAD uses Doxygen for API documentation. It's a simple way for developers to document API by merely adding /** comments like this */ to their code, typically before a function. The primary goal of this project is to make sure all of the public API has a Doxygen comment, has parameters tagged appropriately, grouped accordingly, and that all groupings are documented as well. The secondary goal is to then publish the output from Doxygen to our website in HTML and PDF forms so that reference documentation is available to everyone.

BRL-CAD has extensive documentation infrastructure using Docbook XML whereby we "compile" them into HTML, PDF, and other formats. This approach helps ensure docs remain up-to-date, without syntax/structure errors, and allows the documentation to be composed and reused in different ways (e.g., an tutorial on some topic might get embedded as an appendix in one document or a chapter to another). That said, the underlying format is tedious to write and hard for contributors. We'd like to migrate to a newer system like Docusaurus or Antora, converting everything over while still retaining build system integration.